Excerpt

Exclusive Excerpt: Roger Ailes Off Camera

Roger Ailes is one of the most powerful—and controversial—characters in television media, pilloried by critics and many in the mainstream media and lionized by conservative viewers who can’t get enough of his posse of charismatic hosts. His Fox News was accused of being the “communications arm of the Republican Party” in 2010 by then White House communications director Anita Dunn and has been criticized by Barack Obama himself (criticism that Ailes publicly countered with gusto, claiming the president “just has a different belief system from most Americans”). But as outspoken as the Fox News chief may be, little is known about Ailes the man—an extraordinarily private and security-conscious person who once personally safety-tested the thickness of the glass at the network’s Manhattan studios. This year, the veil is pulled back by two high-profile biographies—one written with Ailes’s cooperation, by award-winning columnist and author Zev Chafets, and one unauthorized, by prolific New York–magazine media reporter Gabriel Sherman. The books will hit stands within months of one another and undoubtedly paint strikingly different portraits; while Sherman has for years covered the media, Fox News, and Ailes in particular, Chafets was given unprecedented access to the man himself, as well as his friends, family, and colleagues. What resulted from the latter effort was a series of intimate encounters that have made their way into the book, showing the world from Ailes’s perspective. Vanityfair.com has obtained an exclusive adaptation of Chafets’s book, Roger Ailes: Off Camera, to be published later this month by Penguin Sentinel, in which several of these private moments are detailed—including one famous face-off with the president.

In mid-January 2012, Roger Ailes skipped out on his duties at Fox News to attend a basketball game. The contest featured his 12-year-old son, Zac, who plays for his Upper East Side Catholic boys’ school. Ailes, in a folding chair along the sideline, was dressed in his work clothes: black suit, starched white shirt, gold tie clip, and matching cuff links. His hair was slicked back and a pair of bifocals perched on his nose. The overall effect was that of a formal, somewhat forbidding small-town banker in a Frank Capra movie.

Ailes is past 70 and looks it, especially when he tries to walk on his bum leg. The other parents were young enough to be his children. But Zac is his only child, and perhaps the only person who could lure Ailes away from his office on a Wednesday afternoon. This was the third game of the season, and he had been there every time.

As we waited for the tip-off, Ailes ran down the roster. “Our guys,” he called them. Zac was easily the tallest kid on the team, and when the action commenced, his father encouraged him to take advantage of it. “Don’t get boxed out,” he shouted. “Use your height. Hands up on defense!” Zac hit the first shot of the game, and Ailes clapped loudly and shouted his approval. But Zac’s team, wearing red, was no match for the other school’s. As they fell behind, Ailes grew tense, barking instructions at his son and the rest of the team, but the advice wasn’t helping. During a time-out he extracted his BlackBerry for a quick peek at the standings. “Let’s see if Fox News is still on the air,” he said.

Back on the court, Zac caught a stray elbow to the eye. “Shake it off,” Ailes yelled. “Rub it out! Back on defense! Get all over them! Come on, fellas, show some heart!” But sometimes heart isn’t enough. At the final buzzer the score was 29–10. The boys headed for the locker room, but Ailes motioned for Zac, who loped over. “You made a couple of mistakes out there,” he told the boy. “You threw that one ball away. And you missed an open shot underneath.” Zac nodded. “But,” Ailes said more gently, “you did a lot of things right. You played hard. You hustled. You scored 20 percent of your team’s points. And when you got hit you didn’t whine.”

Ailes put his arm on Zac’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you, son,” he said. “Now, let’s get you home. You have schoolwork to do.” A black Lincoln was idling at the curb, waiting to drop Zac at home and take Roger Ailes back to the world where he can control the score.

For months, Roger Ailes and I had been meeting regularly at Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, at his home in Putnam County, and at public and private gatherings. In that time I got a closer look at Roger Ailes than any journalist who doesn’t work for him ever has. He is plainspoken, wryly profane, caustic, and above all competitive, whether he is relating how he told NBC not to name its cable channel MSNBC (“M.S. is a damn disease”) or, in an appearance before a student audience, trying to recall the name of a CNN anchor “named after a prison.” (Soledad O’Brien.) Ailes, in his years as a political consultant, created images for a living, and his own narrative is constructed from the sturdy materials of American mythology. In our first meeting, he said he had dug ditches as a kid and would be happy to go back to it if the whole media-empire thing ever fell apart. Ailes is no more likely than I am to dig ditches (and a lot less likely to need to), but I got his point. He is a blue-collar guy from a factory town in Ohio who has stayed close to his roots. After I had known him for a while I asked what he would do if he were president of the United States. He said that he would sign no legislation, create no new regulations, and allow the country to return to its natural, best self, which he locates, with modest social amendments, somewhere in midwestern America circa 1955.

Ailes and Rupert Murdoch are very respectful of each other. Ailes credits Murdoch with realizing that there was a niche audience (“half the country,” as Charles Krauthammer, a Fox contributor, drily put it) for a cable news network with a conservative perspective. Murdoch, for his part, assured me that he doesn’t dictate editorial decisions. “I defer to Roger,” he said. “I have ideas that Roger can accept or not. As long as things are going well … ”

One moment of tension occurred in 2010, when Matthew Freud, the husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth and a powerful British public-relations executive, told The New York Times that “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder, and every other global media business aspires to.” A spokesman for Murdoch replied that his son-in-law had been speaking for himself, and that Murdoch was “proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News.” Ailes mocked Freud in an interview in the Los Angeles Times, saying he couldn’t pick the British flack out of a lineup and suggesting that he (a descendant of Sigmund Freud’s) “needed to see a psychiatrist.”

Murdoch often drops by Ailes’s office to joke and gossip about politics. “Roger and I have a close personal friendship,” he told me. Ailes agrees—up to a point.

“Does Rupert like me? I think so, but it doesn’t matter. When I go up to the magic room in the sky every three months, if my numbers are right, I get to live. If not, I’m killed. Our relationship isn’t about love—it’s about arithmetic. Survival means hitting your numbers. I’ve met or exceeded mine in 56 straight quarters. The reason is: I treat Rupert’s money like it is mine.”

One day during the 2012 primary season, Newt Gingrich complained that Fox News’s support for Mitt Romney was responsible for Gingrich’s poor showing. Rick Santorum had made a similar claim when he dropped out of the race. Gingrich and Santorum had been Fox commentators before getting into the race, and Ailes found their complaints self-serving and disloyal. Brian Lewis, his spokesman, asked Ailes for guidance on how to respond to Newt. “Brush him back,” Ailes said. “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.” Lewis nodded.

Ailes was silent for a moment and then added, “Newt’s a prick.”

Lewis then read Ailes a summary of the flap over Democratic operative Hilary Rosen’s comment that Ann Romney, mother of five, had never worked a day in her life. Ailes spun it without hesitation. “Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.” He noticed my arched eyebrows and added, “I didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters.” (What Obama said was that he feels a laziness in himself that he attributes to his laid-back upbringing in Hawaii.)

“I like Marco Rubio,” Ailes told a staff meeting of Fox News Latino when talk about the Florida senator being Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick was at fever pitch. “But I don’t know about as a vice-presidential candidate. He’s a nice guy, and that role requires kicking the crap out of your opponents.” He paused, thinking about vice presidents he had known. “I have a soft spot for Joe Biden,” he said. “I like him. But he’s dumb as an ashtray.”

During the presidential campaign of 2008, candidate Barack Obama was upset by Fox News, which by then was in its sixth year of cable dominance. A sit-down was arranged with Murdoch and Ailes, who recalls that the meeting took place in a private room at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. (White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to relate the president’s version.) Obama arrived with his aide Robert Gibbs, who seated Ailes directly across from Obama, close enough for Ailes to feel the intention was to intimidate him. He didn’t mind; in fact, he rather appreciated the stagecraft, one political professional to another.

After some pleasantries, Obama got to the point. He was concerned about the way he was being portrayed on Fox, and his real issue wasn’t the news; it was Sean Hannity, who had been battering him every night at nine (and on his radio show, which Fox doesn’t own or control). Ailes didn’t deny that Hannity was anti-Obama. He simply told the candidate not to worry about it. “Nobody who watches Sean’s going to vote for you anyway,” he said.

Obama then asked Ailes what his personal concerns might be. It is a politician’s question that means: What can I do for you?

Ailes said he was mainly concerned about Obama’s strength on national-security issues. The candidate assured Ailes that he had nothing to worry about.

“Well, why are you going around talking about making cuts in weapons systems?” asked Ailes. “If you’re going to cut, why not at least negotiate them and get something in return?”

Obama said that Ailes had been misinformed; he was not advocating unilateral cuts.

“He said this looking me right in the eyes,” says Ailes. “He never dropped his gaze, which is the usual tell. It was as good a lie as anyone ever told me. I said, ‘Senator, I just watched someone say exactly that on my computer screen before coming over here. Maybe it wasn’t you, but it sure looked like you and sounded like you. I think it was you.’ ”

At that point, Gibbs stood and announced that the session was over. “I don’t think he liked the meeting very much,” says Ailes.

In 2007, Ailes started a business channel to compete with CNBC, and though he says it breaks even, Fox Business News still requires his close attention. Five years later, Ailes had his sights set on a recently vacated space on the ground floor of the News Corp. building, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 47th Street. Other divisions of News Corp. were interested in laying hands on the spot, but Ailes intended to get it and use it as a showcase for FBN. On a sunny afternoon in early April, dressed in his customary black suit and accompanied by the network’s chief engineer and a small retinue of aides, he set off on an exploratory foray.

No detail was too small for him during his tour of the studios. Ailes walked over to the huge windows facing Sixth Avenue.

“What’s the stop on this glass?”

“Three fifty-seven caliber,” said the engineer.

“At what range?”

“Close up,” the engineer said.

Ailes nodded. You put a television show on street level, you had better be prepared for armed critics.

Ailes always has one eye on the screen. One day I walked into his private office and found him on the phone deep in conversation with the head of the Fox Television Stations group. “I’m watching Channel 5 right now and there’s something off with the shot,” he said.

On the screen was a morning interview show with two hosts, a man and a woman, and a guest. The conversation didn’t matter to Ailes; it was the picture. “You don’t see our guy’s smile,” he said into the phone. “All you see is him from the side. His ear. Nobody wants to see an ear shot.” There was a pause and then Ailes said, “There’s a problem with the damn framing. And when the guy leans forward, he blocks the guest. Everybody’s sitting on a three-quarter shot. People at home don’t get a sense that anyone is talking to them. Get it fixed.” He hung up and looked at me. “Television is painting the Mona Lisa and you have to do it every three seconds. Right now the head of the station group is calling the station director, who is about to call the executive producer of the show, who will”—he checked his watch—“be calling the line producer right about now and telling him, ‘Ailes says it looks like shit. Change the fucking screen.’ What the hell, I can’t help it. I’m still a director.”

CNN had recently introduced a new graphic design with moving walls, which Ailes thought was foolish. “You’ve got Wolf Blitzer standing out there facing the camera, and suddenly the set moves and you’re looking at his rear end. Wolf’s a good journalist, but I doubt if the audience really wants to see some size 42-short guy with his back to the camera. That’s a production mistake whether the walls move or not.”

“Let CNN buy the new stuff and test it out, and when the technology is right I’ll come in like a ton of bricks,” he says. “You spend a million dollars on some innovation and it turns out that nobody in the department knows how to use the damn thing. So they need something else to make it work. It never stops. When I see that the Framistan is working, we’ll get one. Hell, we’ll get two. But in the meantime, let CNN waste their money.” Framistan, it turns out, is a word Ailes loves. It became popular after it was used on an episode of I Love Lucy—it stands for unnecessary gear. “Framistans always need an additional Framistan. And this network isn’t going to run in the red.”

Ailes revels in his image as a tough-guy. He is fond of recalling rougher times, like the night he punched a hole in the wall of an NBC control room where he was producing The Tomorrow Show. “It was just a drywall, and luckily I didn’t hit any beams. But somebody put a frame around the hole and wrote, don’t mess with roger ailes. If you have a reputation as a badass, you don’t need to fight.”

Ailes admits that he sometimes flies off the handle. This can happen pretty much anywhere. Not long ago, on a ball field near his place in Garrison, NY, his nephew accidentally hit a baseball through the window of a 2012 Prius parked in a church lot. The owners were Koreans who didn’t speak much English, and they were extremely agitated. “It’s just a damn window,” Ailes told them. “I’ll pay for the damn thing.”

“It was a 10-minute incident that I turned into an hour,” Ailes said when he told me the story. “Hell, it’s lucky they didn’t recognize me. It could have turned into a goddamn international scandal. But I told them I was sorry ” He laughed. “Damn it, though, I was kind of glad that it was a Prius.”

As he told the story, Ailes was already spinning it. “I do have a hair trigger, but I only use it on things that don’t matter these days,” he said. “I just do it to blow off steam, create some bullshit.”

Ailes has a very acute sense of his own mortality. “I’d give anything for another 10 years,” he often says, and, typically, he has crunched the numbers.

“My doctor told me that I’m old, fat, and ugly, but none of those things is going to kill me immediately,” he told me shortly before his 72nd birthday. “The actuaries say I have six to eight years. The best tables give me 10. Three thousand days, more or less.”

I asked if he is afraid to die. “Because of my hemophilia, I’ve been prepared to face death all of my life. As a boy I spent a lot of time in hospitals. My parents had to leave at the end of visiting hours, and I spent a lot of time just lying there in the dark, thinking about the fact that any accident could be dangerous or even fatal. So I’m ready. Everybody fears the unknown. But I have a strong feeling there’s something bigger than us. I don’t think all this exists because some rocks happened to collide. I’m at peace. When it comes, I’ll be fine, calm. I’ll miss life, though. Especially my family.”

One day in his office, Ailes showed me a photo of Zac in a school play. The boy was made up as Teddy Roosevelt, in a suit and a fake mustache. Ailes studied the picture wistfully. The most painful fact of Ailes’s life is that he isn’t likely to see his son as a grown man. “I never really knew much about my father’s life, what it was really like,” he says. “I’m not going to be here forever and I want Zac to know me.”

Since Zac was four, Ailes has been putting things away for him in memory boxes; there are now nine, stuffed with mementos, personal notes, photos, and messages from Ailes to his son. They are meant to be opened when Ailes is gone. I was curious to see what Ailes was leaving behind. He was reluctant to show me, but he finally brought one of the boxes to his office. I had been expecting an ornate trunk, but it turned out to be nothing more than a large plastic container stuffed with what appeared to be a random assortment of memorabilia. There was a pocket-size copy of the U.S. Constitution in which Ailes had written, “The founders believed it and so should you”; photos of Zac and Ailes’s wife Beth on family vacations; an itinerary of their trip to the White House Christmas party; and a sentimental 14th-anniversary card from Beth (“It’s important for him to know that his mommy loved his daddy,” Ailes said), on which he had scrawled a note to Zac: “Your mother is a beautiful woman. Always take care of her.” I saw a printed program from a Fourth of July celebration in Garrison in which father and son had read patriotic texts aloud, a few articles and press releases about Ailes’s career, and a couple of biographies of Ronald Reagan. Tossed in with the other stuff was a plain brown envelope that contained $2,000 in cash and a note: “Here’s the allowance I owe you,” which Ailes said was an inside joke sure to make his son smile. There were also a few symbolic gold coins, “just in case everything goes to hell,” he told me. “If you have a little gold and a handgun, you can always get across the Canadian border.” Zac is still too young for a pistol, but he sometimes accompanies his father to the shooting range at West Point for target practice.

At the bottom of the box there was a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War with paternal advice inscribed on the first page:

Z—

Avoid war if at all possible but never give up your freedom—or your honor. Always stand for what is right.

If absolutely forced to fight, then fight with courage and win. Don’t try to win … win!

Love, Dad

“This is advice Zac might need to hear from me in 10 years and I won’t be here to give it to him,” Ailes said as he closed the box. “I’ve told him, if he has a problem or he feels he needs me, to go off to a quiet place and listen, and he will hear my voice.”

I asked Roger Ailes what he imagined heaven would be like. “I’m pretty sure that God’s got a sense of humor,” he said. “I think he gets a laugh out of me from time to time, so I suppose things will be all right.”

“What if you get there and it turns out that God is a liberal?” I asked.

Ailes paused. It was something that evidently hadn’t occurred to him. “Well, hell, if God’s a liberal, that’s his business,” he said. He paused again, imagining it. “But I doubt very much that he is. He’s got a good heart.” Ailes sat back, pleased with his moment of theological speculation. The hell with his critics here on earth. He has every expectation that, when the time comes he will find himself standing at the seat of judgment before a fair and balanced God.